The Secret Non-Canon Origin of Doc Savage: Escape From Loki

(This is another heavily rewritten post from my own blog)

In 1972, science fiction author Philip José Farmer published Tarzan Alive, a “biography” of Tarzan that treated him as a real person Edgar Rice Burroughs had fictionalized. Which is how Burroughs himself presented his character, claiming that he’d heard the story from a British official whose lips were loosened by booze, then confirmed it by browsing old records.

“Tarzan is real” was a great hook for Farmer’s book and he had my teenage self half-convinced. I mean, I knew Tarzan wasn’t real … but what if he was?The book may be more famous for the appendix which introduced Farmer’s Wold Newton theory: a radioactive meteor hit the tiny village of Wold Newton and caused a superhuman mutation in people nearby. This mutation, passed on to their descendants, eventually gave us Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Doc Savage, the Shadow and multiple other exceptional adventurers, many of whom are at least distantly related. It’s an intriguing mythos that many fans embraced, myself included; I wrote a couple of articles for an early Wold Newton fanzine, though it folded before they came out.

Not long afterwards, Farmer followed Tarzan Alive up with Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, taking the same approach to the pulp’s Man of Bronze. I think it’s less effective than the first book because Doc, unlike Tarzan, is much more a part of 20th Century America which provokes some pretentious waffling from Farmer (his comparison of Doc’s adventures to Henry Miller’s and William Burroughs’ writing adds nothing to my understanding of any of them). It’s also noteworthy for Farmer expanding on the reference in Lester Dent’s first Doc Savage novel, The Man of Bronze, to Doc and his friends meeting during WW I.

In Farmer’s version, they met specifically while in a POW camp, Loki. It’s proven a remarkably successful addition to the mythos, to the point that many fans think it’s part of Dent’s original pulp canon. It’s influenced other writers, too. Lin Carter references Loki in one of his Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown pulp pastiches, when Zarkon meets Doc’s aide Renny. Mike Barr used Loki in DC’s 1989 Doc Savage Annual when telling the back story of Doc meeting his team during WW I.Eentually, perhaps inevitably, Farmer gave it a shot himself in 1991′s Escape From Loki. I wish he hadn’t because it’s an awful book. I had to struggle to get through it and probably wouldn’t if I hadn’t been a Doc Savage fan from tweenhood.

Before I get into that, a side note. While it didn’t bother me back when I read Farmer’s Doc biography, now that I’ve reread the entire pulp series I don’t think Doc fits Wold Newton as well as I once did. As Doc complains to Dent in the prologue to  No Light to Die By, he looks superhuman to someone who doesn’t know him but he’s not; he’s just a guy who spent the first twenty years of life in intensive, grueling training. That said, let’s get back to Farmer’s book. The story starts well, with Doc — 16 years old but big enough to bluff his way into the military — engaging in a dog fight that takes out a couple of barrage balloons on the enemy side. He winds up crashing in German-held territory, gets caught, escapes and eventually ends up in Loki, a prison camp run by the sinister mad scientist Von Hessel. Doc meets Monk, Ham and the others along the way.

Von Hessel appears to be using the POWS for germ warfare experiments. In reality he’s testing improvements to the bacteria-based treatment that has made him ageless. He offers this to Doc to convince him to switch sides but Doc doesn’t corrupt easily. At the end, Von Hessel escapes, leaving open the possibility of another book. Mercifully we never got it.

Farmer was never a good choice for this project. Like Robert A. Heinlein he got into the habit of lecturing readers as he grew older and his lectures got increasingly wordy. By 1991, Farmer’s writing style too slow and thoughtful to work for Doc Savage, even in a pastiche. Farmer wrote lots of introspection into his characters so his Clark Savage Jr. (technically not a doctor yet) is similarly into navel-gazing. That doesn’t feel like Doc, a self-confessed adrenalin junkie who thrived on excitement. It also drains any emotional heft out of the book. Doc’s reaction to everything is to analyze it thoughtfully rather than react with feeling. Even when Von Hessel’s mistress Lili arouses him, the emphasis is less on Doc’s lust than him analyzing his lust.

As an adventure, Escape from Loki is just too damn dull. It’s mundane — the immortalist element only comes in at the last minute — and while Dent could have spun an exciting tale about Doc escaping a prison camp, Farmer doesn’t have the knack (few people doing Doc pastiches have Dent’s knack). Plus Farmer’s always been sexist. Doc Savage Magazine included a number of capable, interesting women, such as Retta Ken in The Roar Devil. Lili has no personality other than being sexy and decadent.

Farmer also gets a key point of the mythos wrong. Doc’s aide Theodore Brooks got his nickname of Ham because during the war, his perennial frenemy Monk framed him for stealing pigs and Brooks, despite being the best lawyer Harvard ever turned out, couldn’t clear his name. Escape From Loki says Ham proved his innocence.

If Farmer had written the book a quarter-century earlier, it might have been good. His earlier Doc Savage pastiche, The Mad Goblin, is a much better read. But Farmer got his hands on the real Man of Bronze way too late.

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